Fueled by Clouds & Coffee: Graphite as a Painterly Medium

Eduardo Bajzek demo-ing how he sketches trees as silhouettes.

When I took Eduardo Bajzek’s workshop at the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Porto, my head exploded with a fresh way to use graphite as a drawing medium. That was in 2018, when the focus had been more on buildings and urban landscapes. Last week in Edmonds, he told us that he has been drawing trees more lately, so his workshop reflected that interest. Trees can teach us much about drawing all forms, Eduardo says. Called “Sketch the Trees and the Daffodils,” the workshop put urban trees in the center of our attention with a surprising medium when taking a painterly approach: graphite.

In the first brief exercise, we resisted shading and form and focused on drawing trees only as solid silhouettes. In his demo, he showed how he starts from the trunk and moves upwards, following the growth of the tree and evoking the movement of the foliage. Edges should be suggested rather than described. He urged us to observe and appreciate each tree as a unique, individual entity, not a generic symbol.

In the second exercise that took up the remainder of the workshop, we were instructed to choose a tree to draw with the techniques he demonstrated: Laying down multiple light layers of graphite using the side of the point while resisting “drawing” outlines. In the 2018 workshop, this was the most difficult part for me – a pencil in my hand seems to demand drawing an outline! But resist I did (although the technique was not new to me this time around, it was still challenging!), and my workshop exercise resulted in a much more painterly appearance than a typical graphite drawing.

7/20/24 graphite in Hahnemuhle sketchbook

Eduardo demo-ing for the second exercise

Eduardo showed us how to smudge graphite (with a stump or even a piece of tissue) to soften edges and unify elements, again to suggest rather than to describe. The result is the dreamy, ethereal quality his work is known for. At the very end of his drawing process, he goes in with a softer, sharper pencil to add the darkest values and define important details where the eye should be directed – yet still with much restraint.

Speaking of the V word, Eduardo is a rare instructor who does not push values as the most important aspect of a drawing. Sometimes the lightest light or darkest dark must be compromised, he says, to achieve an overall unification of the drawing. That was surprising to hear!

When it came time for one-on-one feedback, Eduardo pointed out in the tree I had selected where the trunk and branches sometimes appeared darker than the foliage and in other places appeared lighter. He encouraged me to use an eraser to make lighter branches come forward and darken others against lighter foliage.

Eduardo giving feedback to a student
(I took this photo mainly for the eye candy of his opened pencil roll :-) )

Throughout the workshop, Eduardo stressed the concept of connection: The artist connecting with the subject and the tree connecting with its context. “Connect with your subject as much as possible,” he says. Sometimes after finishing a drawing, he pauses to say to the tree, “Thank you for the inspiration.” I have done that myself many times, and I realize now that it was because my observation of the tree through drawing it had formed a strong connection.

As in Porto, I left Eduardo’s workshop re-fired up about graphite as a painterly material. This time I also appreciated graphite as an especially expressive medium for drawing trees.

Roy and I were both so inspired by Eduardo’s workshop that we couldn’t wait to put his techniques and methods into practice. That afternoon, we sat at Starbucks in Edmonds’ town center to sketch the fountain and the tree growing next to it. Even as I fought my inclination to outline and draw, I also found it liberating to ignore all the ornate fountain details and express the unified whole instead. (In another post, I’ll show my final sketch walk drawing in which I take Eduardo’s graphite approach again.)